John
Wood, the architect of Georgian Bath, was
described by the antiquarian William Stukeley as a man of
'crackt
imaginations’. Not the least of the complaints
raised by Stukeley was that he saw no merit in recording the
stones in meticulous detail. Fortunately Wood thought otherwise,
commenting
that Stukeley had done no better than to employ a ‘jobbing bricklayer.... whom he
stiles an architect’
to assist with his plan of the stones.

Wood has left
us the most important record of
Stonehenge ever made, his survey carried out in 1740 was annotated with
hundreds of measurements, which
he resolved on the ground to one half, sometimes even one quarter, of
an inch.

Using
these original dimensions it has been possible to re-draw his work
on a computer and compare the record with the modern plan. Wood's
survey has immense
archaeological value, for he recorded the stones fifty years before the
collapse of the western trilithon (which fell in 1797 and was
not
restored until 1958).